Thursday, October 16, 2014

Friday Thinking 17 October 2014

Hello all – Friday Thinkingis curated in the spirit of sharing – Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

― R. Buckminster Fuller ﻿

The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In" New York Magazine (30 March 1970, p. 30)

As the Internet and digital technologies have proliferated over the past twenty years, incumbent enterprises nearly always resist open network dynamics with fierce determination, a narrow ingenuity and resistance. It arguably started with AOL (vs. the Web and browsers), Lotus Notes (vs. the Web and browsers) and Microsoft MSN (vs. the Web and browsers, Amazon in books and eventually everything) before moving on to the newspaper industry (Craigslist, blogs, news aggregators, podcasts), the music industry (MP3s, streaming, digital sales, video through streaming and YouTube), and telecommunications (VoIP, WiFi). But the inevitable rearguard actions to defend old forms are invariably overwhelmed by the new, network-based ones. The old business models, organizational structures, professional sinecures, cultural norms, etc., ultimately yield to open platforms.

When we look back on the past twenty years of Internet history, we can more fully appreciate the prescience of David P. Reed’s seminal 1999 paper on “Group Forming Networks” (GFNs).[1] “Reed’s Law” posits that value in networks increases exponentially as interactions move from abroadcasting model that offers “best content” (in which value is described by n, the number of consumers) to a network of peer-to-peer transactions (where the network’s value is based on “most members” and mathematically described by n2). But by far the most valuable networks are based on those that facilitate group affiliations, Reed concluded. When users have tools for “free and responsible association for common purposes,” he found, the value of the network soars exponentially to 2n – a fantastically large number. This is the Group Forming Network. Reed predicted that “the dominant value in a typical network tends to shift from one category to another as the scale of the network increases.…”

If we take Reed’s analysis of network dynamics seriously, and apply his logic to the contemporary scene, it becomes clear that the best way to unlock enormous stores of value on networks is to develop tools that can facilitate GFNs. This will be the next great Internet disruption. But to achieve this, we must develop a network architecture and software systems that can enable people to build trust and social capital in user-centric, scalable ways.

Necessarily, this means that we must begin to re-imagine the very nature of authority and governance. We must invent new types of digital institutions that are capable of administering authority recognized as authentic and use algorithmic tools to craft and enforce “law.”

In anything other than a protected industry, longevity is the capacity to change, not to stay with what you’ve got. Too many companies build up an internal commitment to their existing businesses, and there’s the problem: it’s very, very difficult to “eat your seed corn,” go into other activities, or radically change something fundamental about what you’ve been doing, like the pricing structure or distribution system. Rather than changing, they find it easier to just keep doing the same things that brought them success. They codify why they’re successful. They write guidebooks. They create teaching manuals. They create whole cultures around sustaining the model. That’s great until the model gets threatened by external change; then, all too often, the adjustment is discontinuous. It requires a wrench, often from an outside force. Andy Grove put it well when he said “only the paranoid survive.”

Remember that the enduring companies we see are not really companies that have lasted for 100 years. They’ve changed 25 times or 5 times or 4 times over that 100 years, and they aren’t the same companies as they were. If they hadn’t changed, they wouldn’t have survived. If you could take a snapshot of the values and processes of most companies 50 years ago—and did the same with a surviving company in 2014—you would say it’s a different company other than, perhaps, its name and maybe its purpose and maybe its industry. The leadership that really counts is the leadership that keeps a company changing in an incremental, continuous fashion. It’s constantly focusing on the outside, on what’s going on in the marketplace, what’s changing there, noticing what competitors are doing.

Lou Gerstner on corporate reinvention and values

The former IBM CEO offers thoughts on principles and strategies that sustain a company in the long run.

“We are looking at full video lifestreaming in the near future. The Lost Generation had to manually document their lives. The Eternity Generations (from now on) face a future where the tapestry of life has ceased to unravel. Lifestreaming from ultrasound to final illness (and beyond if we add intelligent bots to the life data) will be the killer app. The challenge going forward is to live a full life. No one will be able to sit around in their underwear watching TV if their lives are being streamed for current and future generations. There is a small possibility that by 2025 behavior will have normalized (back to passive, not caring of opinion of watchers) but more likely that will take more time.”

Laurel Papworth - Digital Life in 2025 - Killer Apps in Gigabit Age

“The Internet of Things is real. Internet-enabled devices that interact with the physical world will be the norm. They will learn on their own, with some verbal instruction by their users. The big story here is continuous health monitoring… It will be much cheaper and more convenient to have that monitoring take place outside the hospital. You will be able to purchase health-monitoring systems just like you purchase home-security systems. Indeed, the home-security system will include health monitoring as a matter of course. Robotic and remote surgery will become commonplace. Lasik is just the beginning. Tools for artistic creation such as animated videos and interactive games will become much more powerful and enable collaborative creation.”

Historically books were a luxury item. Having become cheap enough for the masses in the 20th century, in the 21st century digital technology and global markets have made them more accessible still. In 2013 around 1.4 million International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) were issued, according to Bowker, a research firm, up from around 8,100 in 1960. Those figures do not capture the many e-books that are being self-published without an ISBN.

Pia Mancini and her colleagues want to upgrade democracy in Argentina and beyond. Through their open-source mobile platform they want to bring citizens inside the legislative process, and run candidates who will listen to what they say.

Here’s a site with all the presentations and paper of a recent European conference - held in September this year - that should be of interest to all scientist.

Today humanity is confronted by a plethora of serious challenges – political, economic, legal, social, cultural, psychological and ecological. These challenges are complex, interrelated, and global in reach. They are a reflection of the inadequacy of current institutions and policies and at a deeper level the inadequacy of current knowledge. They defy comprehension and resolution based on the prevailing principles of social science. The specialized knowledge developed by separate disciplines is inadequate to deal with the increasingly complex interdependencies of the real world. Knowledge needs to evolve to keep pace with the evolution of society.

The evolution of a complex, highly integrated global society necessitates the development of a more comprehensive and integrated science of society. The division into various specialized fields has been a useful mental strategy for the development of the social sciences, leading to significant advances in all fields – knowledge which needs to be preserved and enhanced by future developments. Yet it is increasingly evident that a more comprehensive and integrated approach is now required. As society evolves, its different functions develop greater complexity. At the same time they become more closely and complexly interlinked and interdependent on one another. Economy today is highly dependent on the political system and laws governing the distribution and enforcement of power in society, legal concepts regarding ownership of property and human rights, public institutions responsible for the creation and management of money, rules for commerce between nations, public policies influencing income and wealth distribution, processes that determine collective decision-making, public investment in education and training, and social expectations regarding economy and the future, etc.

Humanity has and will continue to learn much from the separate study of each field of social science, but the effective knowledge needed to meet emerging challenges justifies a greater effort to comprehend the complex inter-linkages and interdependencies between fields. Significant recent advances in emerging fields of science, such as the study of Systems Theory, Complexity, Information Theory, Ecology and Anticipatory Systems, also justify a more concerted effort to identify and comprehend the more fundamental principles and unifying processes common to all fields and aspects of society which serve as foundations for the growth, development and evolution of the complex living organism we call society.

Speaking of a science of society - here some foresight from the Pew Research Project on Data & Society. This is a must read for anyone interested in the Future of Work.

Data & Society’s Future of Labor project has rolled out a stack of working papers that explore issues raised by the impact of technology on work. We’re pleased to share them!

Authors Alex Rosenblat, Tamara Kneese, and danah boyd did the heavy lifting. They had help from D&S fellows Tim Hwang and Karen Levy. Production of these documents was supported by the Open Society Foundations’ U.S. Programs Future of Work inquiry.

Papers are intended as primers to provide framing and foundation for people – from researchers to policymakers to activists – who are trying to get a handle on future of work issues, as well as for Data & Society’s own continued research on the ways data-centric technology is affecting work.

And here another must read for those interested in the future of the digital environment - we all need an Internet that is public infrastructure and governed as a public commons and can deliver network neutral Gigabit capability.

How could people benefit from a gigabit network? One expert in this study, David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, predicted, “There will be full, always-on, 360-degree environmental awareness, a semantic overlay on the real world, and full-presence massive open online courses.Plus Skype won’t break up nearly as much.”

Overall, 1,464 expert respondents weighed in on the following question. New killer apps in the gigabit age:Will there be new, distinctive, and uniquely compelling technology applications that capitalize upon significant increases in bandwidth in the US between now and 2025?

The age of gigabit connectivity is dawning and will advance in coming years. The only question is how quickly it might become widespread. A gigabit connection can deliver 1,000 megabits of information per second (Mbps). Globally, cloud service provider Akamai reports that the average global connection speed in quarter one of 2014 was 3.9 Mbps, with South Korea reporting the highest average connection speed, 23.6 Mbps and the US at 10.5 Mbps.

In some respects, gigabit connectivity is not a new development. The US scientific community has been using hyper-fast networks for several years, changing the pace of data sharing and enabling levels of collaboration in scientific disciplines that were unimaginable a generation ago.

Gigabit speeds for the “average Internet user” are just arriving in select areas of the world. In the US, Google ran a competition in 2010 for communities to pitch themselves for the construction of the first Google Fiber network running at 1 gigabit per second—Internet speeds 50-100 times faster than the majority of Americans now enjoy.

Personal Data is the new 'oil' - but how can we catalyze a Personal Data Economy that truly benefits everyone? This is a complex, messy challenge comprised of many problems that are inter-connected - solving one may cause (or solve others). This video describes an ecological network approach developed by Vibrant Data Labs for #WETHEDATA ( http://wethedata.org) to gather collective expert input about the complexity of the problem, and boil it down to a few foundational 'Grand Challenges' for catalyzing a new Personal Data Economy.

This short data video was screened at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, January 2013, at inner session about 'Rethinking Personal Data'. We are proud to have helped our friends at the World Economic Forum set the Global Agenda on the Personal Data Economy!

FiNGERS stroke vellum; the calfskin pages are smooth, like paper, but richer, almost oily. The black print is crisp, and every Latin sentence starts with a lush red letter. One of the book’s early owners has drawn a hand and index finger which points, like an arrow, to passages worth remembering.

But to see technology purely as a threat to books risks missing a key point. Books are not just “tree flakes encased in dead cow”, as a scholar once wryly put it. They are a technology in their own right, one developed and used for the refinement and advancement of thought. And this technology is a powerful, long-lived and adaptable one.

Books read in electronic form will boast the same power and some new ones to boot. The printed book is an excellent means of channelling information from writer to reader; the e-book can send information back as well. Teachers will be able to learn of a pupil’s progress and questions; publishers will be able to see which books are gulped down, which sipped slowly. Already readers can see what other readers have thought worthy of note, and seek out like-minded people for further discussion of what they have read. The private joys of the book will remain; new public pleasures are there to be added.

What is the future of the book? It is much brighter than people think.

Speaking of killer app - here’s something for all those hard to reach places - with the potential combine technologies of energy and communications.

For Altaeros Energies, a startup launched out of MIT, the sky's the limit when it comes to wind power. Founded by alumni Ben Glass '08, SM '10 and Adam Rein MBA '10, Altaeros has developed the world's first commercial airborne wind turbine, which uses a helium-filled shell to float as high as a skyscraper and capture the stronger, steadier winds available at that altitude.

Proven to produce double the energy of similarly sized tower-mounted turbines, the system, called Buoyant Air Turbine (or BAT), is now readying for commercial deployment in rural Alaska.

Surrounded by a circular, 35-foot-long inflatable shell made of the same heavy-duty fabric used in blimps and sails, the BAT hovers 1,000 to 2,000 feet above ground, where winds blow five to eight times stronger, as well as more consistently, than winds at tower level (roughly 100 to 300 feet).

Three tethers connect the BAT to a rotating ground station, automatically adjusting its altitude to obtain the strongest possible winds. Power generated by the turbine travels down one of the tethers to the ground station before being passed along to microgrids.

Next year, the BAT will test its ability to power microgrids at a site south of Fairbanks, Alaska, in an 18-month trial funded by the Alaska Energy Authority. People in rural Alaska rely on gas and diesel generators for power, paying upward of $1 per kilowatt-hour for electricity. The BAT, which has a capacity of 30 kilowatts, aims to drop that kilowatt-hour cost down to roughly 18 cents, the co-founders say.

Designed to handle winds of more than 100 mph, the system is unaffected by rain or snow. However, should the weather get too inclement, or should a tether break loose, the BAT's secondary grounding tether—will self-dock.

Because the BAT is an advanced aerostat platform, Glass says, customers can use it to lift additional "payloads," such as weather monitoring and surveillance equipment.

But perhaps the most logical added "payload," Glass says, is Wi-Fi technology: "If you have a remote village, for instance," he says, "you can put a Wi-Fi unit up, outside the village, and you're much higher than you'd get with a traditional tower. That would allow you to cover six to eight times the area you would with a tower."

I’ve been a fan of Google+ since it started. Pretty much everything in this interview resonates with me - especially the fact that privacy settings, ease of selective sharing and NO ADS make Google+ the best choice for me in terms of a social network platform - the problem is that other platforms sustain themselves through hostage social capital - it’s easy for one person to leave a platform like Facebook - but it impossible to expect your whole network to shift with you - because that means each person will want their network to shift too. This is a pretty good interview with the new head of Google+

Google+ isn’t dying anytime soon, says Google’s new head of social media David Besbris.

Of course, you’d expect the person in charge of the social network to say so, despite the fact that it’s hard to ignore the chatter about the imminent demise of Google’s social media efforts following the departure of longtime Google+ head Vic Gundotra, who unexpectedly left in April.

Besbris assured us Google intends to continue investment in the division. The former VP of engineering for Google+ took the reins from Gundotra in April and now oversees all of Google’s social products. The Google+ team has new offices on the east side of Google’s sprawling Mountain View, Calif. campus, and rumors that the team was dwindling are also not true. “We’re the largest we’ve ever been,”

Photos are one of the strengths of Google+ — also Video hangouts are pretty incredible. There’s no technology out there as refined for doing the multi-party video as what we have.

In the consumer space, some of what we’ve seen that’s really incredible has been communities. That’s what we’ve seen take off like a rocket inside Google+.

Speaking about Google+ here’s something about the Millennials - not very deep since it really for marketers.

Zora Fabiana Reed, who will be four years old in December, connects strongly with the Disney brand. When she was two years old, she preferred Disney’s Minnie Mouse diapers. That was no surprised to Zora’s dad, otherwise known as Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed.

“Research shows that children become very aware of brands at a very early age and start forming their preferences for brands at a very early age,” Twitter Reed noted. “The child will begin to influence the parent in terms of purchases.”

Consumers use brands as a platform for self-expression, which means they can be a company’s or product’s best advocate, but also be badly let down when they feel that the firm has broken a promise…

...the millennial generation (which runs roughly from the early 1980s to the early 2000s) thinks differently about brands than its Generation X predecessors (people born between the 1960s and the 1980s) and the Baby Boomers before them. “Millennials tend to be very socially aware, are prone to be more public about it, and they are simply more thoughtful and forward looking about, ‘Why am I here? What am I going to leave behind? How am I going to change the world?’” said Reed. “All of these lofty things were in the minds of other generations, but not at the center to the extent that they are for millennials.” That explains the heightened awareness of environmentally friendly products among millennials, he added.

Maybe Millennials don’t think this way - but I think we have to consider this next piece in relation to the future of work. This is an older piece from 2010 - but just as relevant now.

The companies that have created the most new value in the last decade, are Internet companies like Facebook, Google, etc. They've created hundreds of billions in market value, driven by billions in financial profits. Good for them, but bad for us.

Why? IF these companies represent the most valuable new industry of the early 21st Century, where are the jobs that will provide prosperity for millions today, and potentially tens of millions in the future? They don't exist. These companies create few real jobs.

The distressing part is that in reality these companies actually employ hundreds of millions of people, particularly young and otherwise un or underemployed superusers. People that work for them day in and day out for free: finding, sifting, sorting, connecting, building, etc.

For anyone interested in easy video conferencing other than using Google+ Hangouts here’s something that might be more friendly in a corporate setting.

Highfive Wants to Do for Video Conferencing What Nest Did for Thermostats

It’s not an exaggeration to say that all conference calls are lame. But maybe … it’s the hardware?

Highfive is a new device that promises to cut the speakerphones, projectors and dial-ins from company cultures. It’s trying to follow the Nest formula — take a gadget that’s boring, make it slick and friendly. And it’s coming from Shan Sinha, who left Microsoft to start the Microsoft Office-to-Google-Docs translator startup DocVerse, which was bought by Google in 2010.

The Highfive device itself contains a high-def camera, an array of four mics, and a mount so it can sit on top of a television. It’s sleekly packaged and, once set up, requires no additional cables or remote controls. It costs $799, which sounds like a lot, but Sinha argues is the same as a nice iPad.

Highfive works similarly to Apple TV or Google Chromecast, in that users can hand off content from a phone or computer to the big display. Highfive owners can invite people to join a video conference by sharing a URL. They don’t need a device to participate.

A fleet of marine robots is being launched in the largest deployment of its kind in British waters. Unmanned boats and submarines will travel 500km (300 miles) across an area off the southwestern tip of the UK.

The aim is to test new technologies and to map marine life in a key fishing ground.

In total, seven autonomous machines are being released in a trial heralded as a new era of robotic research at sea. Two of the craft are innovative British devices that are designed to operate for months using renewable sources of power including wind and wave energy.

The project, led by the National Oceanography Centre, involves more than a dozen research centres and specialist companies. Chief scientist Dr Russell Wynn told BBC News: "This is the first time we've deployed this range of vehicles carrying all these instruments. "And it's exciting that it's the first time we can measure everything in the water column and all the life in the ocean simultaneously.”

The motivation for exploring the use of massed robotic vehicles is to assess whether they can provide near-constant coverage at far lower cost - the equivalent of CCTV offering round-the-clock surveillance.

And 3D printing progresses.

Surgeons used a 3D printed model of the infant’s unusual heart to prepare for life-saving surgery

Surgeons at a New York hospital have credited 3D printing with helping to save the life of a 2-week-old baby who required complicated heart surgery.

Using MRI scan data, Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in New York City 3D printed a copy of the child’s heart, which was both riddled with holes and structured unusually.

Surgery was going to be complicated and dangerous, but this 3D printed heart provided the surgeons the opportunity to study the organ, and develop a detailed surgery strategy.

“The baby’s heart had holes, which are not uncommon with CHD, but the heart chambers were also in an unusual formation, rather like a maze,” Dr Emile Bacha, who performed the surgery,told Connecticut local media.

“In the past we had to stop the heart and look inside to decide what to do. With this technique, it was like we had a road map to guide us. We were able to repair the baby’s heart with one operation.”

Here’s some progress on the domestication of DNA project.

Stem Cells Seem Safe in Treating Eye Disease

A treatment based on embryonic stem cells clears a key safety hurdle, and might help restore vision.

When stem cells were first culled from human embryos 16 years ago, scientists imagined they would soon be treating diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and many other diseases with cells manufactured in the lab.

It’s all taken longer than they thought. But today, a Massachusetts biotech firm reported results from the largest, and longest, human test of a treatment based on embryonic stem cells, saying it appears safe and may have partly restored vision to patients going blind from degenerative diseases.

Results of three-year study were described today in the Lancet by Advanced Cell Technology and collaborating eye specialists at the Jules Stein Eye Institute in Los Angeles who transplanted lab-grown cells into the eyes of nine people with macular degeneration and nine with Stargardt’s macular dystrophy.

The idea behind Advanced Cell’s treatment is to replace retinal pigment epithelium cells, known as RPE cells, a type of caretaker tissue without which a person’s photoreceptors also die, with supplies grown in laboratory. It uses embryonic stem cells as a starting point, coaxing them to generate millions of specialized retina cells. In the study, each patient received a transplant of between 50,000 and 150,000 of those cells into one eye.

The main objective of the study was to prove the cells were safe. Beyond seeing no worrisome side effects, the researchers also noted some improvements in the patients. According to the researchers half of them improved enough to read two to three extra lines on an eye exam chart, results Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell, called remarkable.

Hidden away in the secret depths of the Skunk Works, a Lockheed Martin research team has been working quietly on a nuclear energy concept they believe has the potential to meet, if not eventually decrease, the world’s insatiable demand for power.

Dubbed the compact fusion reactor (CFR), the device is conceptually safer, cleaner and more powerful than much larger, current nuclear systems that rely on fission, the process of splitting atoms to release energy. Crucially, by being “compact,” Lockheed believes its scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to city power stations. It may even revive the concept of large, nuclear-powered aircraft that virtually never require refueling—ideas of which were largely abandoned more than 50 years ago because of the dangers and complexities involved with nuclear fission reactors.

Yet the idea of nuclear fusion, in which atoms combine into more stable forms and release excess energy in the process, is not new. Ever since the 1920s, when it was postulated that fusion powers the stars, scientists have struggled to develop a truly practical means of harnessing this form of energy. Other research institutions, laboratories and companies around the world are also pursuing ideas for fusion power, but none have gone beyond the experimental stage. With just such a “Holy Grail” breakthrough seemingly within its grasp, and to help achieve a potentially paradigm-shifting development in global energy, Lockheed has made public its project with the aim of attracting partners, resources and additional researchers.

And speaking of energy - here’s something that may make our lives much easier - if it works out.

The technology is currently being licensed by a company for eventual production. Prof Chen expects that the new generation of fast-charging batteries will hit the market in the next two years. It also has the potential to be a key solution in overcoming longstanding power issues related to electro-mobility.

“Electric cars will be able to increase their range dramatically, with just five minutes of charging, which is on par with the time needed to pump petrol for current cars,” added Prof Chen.

Scientists at Nanyang Technology University (NTU) have developed ultra-fast charging batteries that can be recharged up to 70 per cent in only two minutes.

The new generation batteries also have a long lifespan of over 20 years, more than 10 times compared to existing lithium-ion batteries.

This breakthrough has a wide-ranging impact on all industries, especially for electric vehicles, where consumers are put off by the long recharge times and its limited battery life.

With this new technology by NTU, drivers of electric vehicles could save tens of thousands on battery replacement costs and can recharge their cars in just a matter of minutes. Commonly used in mobile phones, tablets, and in electric vehicles, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries usually last about 500 recharge cycles. This is equivalent to two to three years of typical use, with each cycle taking about two hours for the battery to be fully charged.

And in the world of 3D printing - another gun has been developed. There is a 1 min video of it in action.

This German genius has created one of the most awesome inventions in recent memory, one that will bring incredible voice to humanity: A fully automated paper airplane machine gun. Yes, people: A machine gun that folds plain paper sheets into airplanes and then fire them across the sky.

He fully designed it and then 3D printed most of it, he says. I really hope that he starts some crowdfunding thing for mass manufacturing. Or at least share his plans on the internet.

Everyone has experience a sense of accelerating change. But no one knows how things are going to turn out. What can we expect our social-cultures, our political-economies and our institutions to look like in 10-20 years (or more)? We are all vulnerable to an intuitively linear imagination of the unfolding future and worse we also tend to imagine future technology overlaid on existing social, organizational and institutional frameworks. It is natural to imagine that we will still go shopping at the mall only we’ll use crypto-currency instead of our credit & debit cards. However, it is much harder to imagine the disappearance or transformation of the mall and the activities of shopping.